Down the Rabbit Hole
May. 25th, 2008 05:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchikToday I went to a zine fair! It was terrifying and wonderful.
I meant to go to a talk at the Sydney Writers Festival, because my writing class substituted attendance for this week's lecture, but I was sort of late and it was apparently quite full, so I checked out the zine fair instead. It was so crowded! Full of the alternative set as well. It was like wandering into another world, I'm not used to dealing with that offline. There was about the same quality range as you get in fanfiction - that is, a few awful photocopies and a few decently bound issues, some nice photomontaging and some pixel art, some good poetry and some badly spelled stream-of-consciousness surrealism. Some were clearly people who wanted to sell random crap, so they made a random "zine" by folding over bits of paper and put it on the table alongside their badges and T-shirts and "a mix CD I made for a friend but forgot to give it to her" and whatnot.
You couldn't walk two steps without bumping into someone or catching someone's eye or being asked to buy obscene comics or write on a big styrofoam letter or sign up to a mailing list or buy a badge. One stall had a stack of doilies with a sign that said "doyleys." I came back later and they had a new sign that said "doilys." I giggled. I only had two dollars fifty on me, so I bought a couple of dollar zines entitled "How Things Work" - they're an example of the cooler end of the photocopied lot. IE, they were actually stapled, and the design was decent, and the content was interesting (I did not know how ice cream was made), and there were not so many spelling errors. Also something called the "cardboard collective" which was kind of interesting because they gave their photocopied pages a cardboard cover by, I think, cutting about three-quarters of the way through a rectangle of cardboard with a knife and folding it over. Then they tied it together with string. It ended up looking a lot better than most of the photocopied zines, although the contents could've used a good copy-edit. By the time I got there my anxiety levels were fairly high, what with all the EVERYTHING, so I cut short my chat with the cute scene kid behind the counter and made my escape to the fading strains of "-and we're totally looking for contributors..."
On my way out I stopped to look at some really awesome sculptures made of rubbish - I should have taken photos, they were really good. The woman at the table said they were made by this Indonesian guy who was here for three months, and he just collected random junk and welded it together. One of them looked like a rat carrying a hockey stick. I admitted to the woman that I was feeling sort of lost, because I hadn't even known all this existed. "Oh you're not lost then," she said. "You're found."
I meant to go to a talk at the Sydney Writers Festival, because my writing class substituted attendance for this week's lecture, but I was sort of late and it was apparently quite full, so I checked out the zine fair instead. It was so crowded! Full of the alternative set as well. It was like wandering into another world, I'm not used to dealing with that offline. There was about the same quality range as you get in fanfiction - that is, a few awful photocopies and a few decently bound issues, some nice photomontaging and some pixel art, some good poetry and some badly spelled stream-of-consciousness surrealism. Some were clearly people who wanted to sell random crap, so they made a random "zine" by folding over bits of paper and put it on the table alongside their badges and T-shirts and "a mix CD I made for a friend but forgot to give it to her" and whatnot.
You couldn't walk two steps without bumping into someone or catching someone's eye or being asked to buy obscene comics or write on a big styrofoam letter or sign up to a mailing list or buy a badge. One stall had a stack of doilies with a sign that said "doyleys." I came back later and they had a new sign that said "doilys." I giggled. I only had two dollars fifty on me, so I bought a couple of dollar zines entitled "How Things Work" - they're an example of the cooler end of the photocopied lot. IE, they were actually stapled, and the design was decent, and the content was interesting (I did not know how ice cream was made), and there were not so many spelling errors. Also something called the "cardboard collective" which was kind of interesting because they gave their photocopied pages a cardboard cover by, I think, cutting about three-quarters of the way through a rectangle of cardboard with a knife and folding it over. Then they tied it together with string. It ended up looking a lot better than most of the photocopied zines, although the contents could've used a good copy-edit. By the time I got there my anxiety levels were fairly high, what with all the EVERYTHING, so I cut short my chat with the cute scene kid behind the counter and made my escape to the fading strains of "-and we're totally looking for contributors..."
On my way out I stopped to look at some really awesome sculptures made of rubbish - I should have taken photos, they were really good. The woman at the table said they were made by this Indonesian guy who was here for three months, and he just collected random junk and welded it together. One of them looked like a rat carrying a hockey stick. I admitted to the woman that I was feeling sort of lost, because I hadn't even known all this existed. "Oh you're not lost then," she said. "You're found."
